Stem cell cure for cataracts in sight

KIM LANDERS: Scientists have made huge progress in the field of regenerative medicine, successfully treating a dozen infants born with cataracts.

The procedure allows the patients' own stem cells to create working lenses in their eyes.

The researchers involved in the study have just published their research in the journal Nature, as Sarah Sedghi reports.

SARAH SEDGHI: It's a procedure which could change the way cataracts are treated.

In a study, researchers have been able to demonstrate a way of restoring vision for children born with the eye condition.

MARK DANIELL: Cataract surgery is one of most common forms of surgery done in the western world and we've been doing it similar way for a very large number of years so to have a paradigm shift like this is quite extraordinary.

SARAH SEDGHI: Mark Daniell, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the Centre for Eye Research Australia, explains how the process works.

MARK DANIELL: Well the current technique for removing cataract involves removing the surface membrane of the lens and then the entire opaque central part of the lens. What they've done in this study is they've they managed to leave the layer of cells that can regenerate a lens intact and just remove the cloudy central lens material.

So remove the cataract but leave the membrane around the cataract intact with all of the cells in them, and those cells almost miraculously managed to recreate a lens over six or nine months.

SARAH SEDGHI: The procedure was developed by Chinese and American researchers and was used to restore the vision of 12 children in a small trial.

The first infant was treated two years ago and can still see well.

Dr Kang Zhang is the chief of Ophthalmic Genetics and founding director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the University of California, San Diego.

He's the lead author of the study and hopes a similar procedure could help older patients with cataracts too.

KANG ZHANG: I think the same principle applies to another condition called age-related cataract, which is the most common cause of blindness worldwide.

So what we are actually planning to do is to expand this study into adult cataract.

SARAH SEDGHI: In a separate study also just published in Nature, researchers reported being able to regenerate different types of tissue from the eye using stem cells.

Stephanie Watson is a clinical professor at the Save Sight Institute.

STEPHANIE WATSON: Oh, that was pretty exciting because stem cells grew different types of ocular tissues and most techniques to date have just focused on growing one particular eye tissue or cell at a time, where often in eye diseases, more than one layer might be affected by injury or disease. And so it was a way of basically moving towards recreating an eye.

SARAH SEDGHI: Associate Professor Daniell is optimistic about the latest research and what it could mean for patients.

MARK DANIELL: Adult cataract surgery, we put artificial lens in to replace the refractive power of the lens so that people don't need to wear glasses.

With a child, operating on a very small child or a baby, their eyes continue to grow and so you can't use the usual intraocular lenses.

Some people worry that intraocular lenses can damage the inside of the eye, causing inflammation - so children without intraocular lenses, they've had to have contact lenses fitted and as you can imagine fitting contact lens on a baby is extremely difficult.

If you don't replace the refractive power of the lens in some way, the baby develops dense amblyopia, dense lazy eye and won't be able to see out of the eye so surgery is not useful.

So they've been a very complicated group to operate on and the results haven't been as good as they could possibly be. This way, if the eye, the lens regenerate naturally and regains and not only sight but accommodation, you know, the ability to change its focus, that would be a miraculous improvement.